Why your public Facebook comments are useless to the world?

Why your public Facebook comments are useless to the world?(tux.so)

24 points by lanbird 11 years ago

Before everyone piles on about the author being a technical idiot and assigning conspiracy to eventual consistency, it does reveal a more interesting insight in a world where tech folk are largely in denial of the real-world political consequences of their work - that eventual consistency can potentially provide a cover of plausible deniability to censorship.

pain 11 years ago | |

Exactly. How fb privately moderates manually and can delete entire posts without question or reversal, falls through cracks.

Facebook needs to determine a way to score and moderate without annihilating individual writers selectively.

Even just cause it frequently has mistakes. We don't need to recreate jail statistics with guilt and innocence so pronounced by secret individual actions. We can record it.

Liesmith 11 years ago |

This isn't clearly written (English not the first language?) but the gist of it is actually interesting: the implication is that controversial or provocative posts get pruned from facebook (or at least buried under a view more comments button) and the less controversial ones rise to the top. Unfortunately it's a pretty poorly done experiment but it might be worth looking into.

pygy_ 11 years ago | |

> the implication is that controversial or provocative posts get pruned from facebook (or at least buried under a view more comments button) and the less controversial ones rise to the top.

AFAIK, it is more complex than that, and the description of the author is correct:

A "bad" comment is moderated away for everyone but its author and his/her the friends.

leeoniya 11 years ago | | |

looks like hellbanning just leveled up.

rectangletangle 11 years ago |

I actually wrote a comments-section application to address this exact issue (It should be up and running by next Friday or so, notbl.com). Everything's anonymous with no social media integration, to help alleviate autocensorship. There's no notion of "down-voting" to prevent controversial opinions from being cast into oblivion. Website owners can censor their own instance of the application. However, changes are only visible when viewing the thread on the owner's website. Viewing the thread on the main site (my site), will display the thread with only spam redacted.

abritishguy 11 years ago |

Surely the most logical way to test this hypothesis would be to write a normal comment and write a "provocative" comment and see if there is any difference between the two comments made at the same time on the same account. Had the author done this they would have found out there was no difference and this is simply down to the public parts being heavily cached.

lanbird 11 years ago | |

I done it only from 2 different accounts. Overall i used 6 accounts. I will test it with the same , thanks

cix 11 years ago |

I work with Ads on a lot of platforms, you can set that certain keyboards or phrases are blocked. In the sense that the post is still made, but it is not served to the public. Their is no conspiracy here, if anyone is causing that censorship it is the post promoter.

yotsechan 11 years ago | |

Yup.

An administrator of a Facebook page can hide a comment made on that page to all but the commenter himself and his friends. The other comments that the author saw disappear were most likely hidden while he was logging in/out. No conspiracy, just a spineless Facebook Pages feature.